Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all perform as just a single unit where data is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the data on all of the drives shall be identical all of the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ according to the specific setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information saved on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file properly and to confirm the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information that you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content you upload will be held on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID fails since the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a hard drive fails, the system can easily switch to a different one right away without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you use one of our VPS server plans, any content which you upload will be kept on SSD drives that operate in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity to guarantee the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk inside the RAID breaks down, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the information that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any potential for corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ ordinary hard drives which function in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.